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Questions from Tech Days in Italy

I've been very busy during this week at the Italy tech days and NetBeans days. It's been quite a pleasant experience (except for the Alitalia flight from Rome to Milan, the landing looked a bit like if the pilots would fight over their steering wheel, but I am alive :) The NetBeans days went pretty well, except for a 20-minute alarm during my presentation in Milan - that was really bad! But it seems that everyone is excited about NetBeans 6, I read the results of the surveys people filled in and almost everyone wants to use NetBeans after seeing it, except for very few undecided developers, noone said "no" after seeing the full power of NetBeans!.

Some of the more interesting questions were:

Q: Does NetBeans support Spring?A: NetBeans does not support Spring out of the box, but you can get a Spring plugin from the plugin portal.

Q: Where can I find documentation for JSR 295 and 296?A: For 296 there is a great document on java.sun.com. JSR 295 is problematic, especially converter and validator docs seem to be missing + other advanced topics :( At least there's Shannon Hickey's blog, but in my opinion we need more documentation for Beans Binding! If you have any good pointers please let me know.

Q: How do I migrate to NetBeans if I use JBuilder or Eclipse?A: Look at our migration guides for JBuilder and Eclipse. We have a full session about moving from Eclipse and using Eclipse together with NetBeans.

Q: I enjoyed the demos at NetBeans day. Are these demos scripted somewhere?A: Yes, our demos are scripted on the NetBeans worldtour wiki page.

Q: Question: any plans to support visual design for GWT?A: We'd
love to, but it's not on the roadmap now - too few resources. Maybe the
community can help?

Q: NetBeans has slow startup. Can I do something to speed it up?A: Yes, try installing a minimal set of plugins. The new installer for NetBeans 6 lets you choose only those pieces of functionality you need and you can update through the plugin manager. If you run Windows also make sure you turn off your antivirus for NetBeans files, it may slow it down significantly.

Thanks to everyone for the interesting discussions I had, flying to Sardinia now for another NetBeans day :)